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tuart Bailie was awaiting the latest batch of reviews when I called, those already received suggesting plenty of appreciation for his latest ambitious project.

I concur, having not long finished this carefully-researched, highlyinformed, beautifully-written tome. But while Stuart counts seeing The Clash at the Ulster Hall among his most inspirational moments, don’t expect him to over-personalise his story.

“I was eight when the conflict started, and don’t remember much about that. And every now and then you’re dealing with very heavy stuff, so I decided to take a back seat and try not to judge. With Northern Ireland, it’s like walking on eggshells, so I was trying to empathise wherever possible, let the reader come to their own conclusion. I had very heavily-tattooed paramilitaries turn up at a reading the other night in East Belfast, and at the end they shook my hand and said, ‘Well, there you go – we’ve been through that’. Then in Derry you meet people from the other end of the spectrum, so I think as a strategy that kind of approach worked. And I’ve tried avoiding words like terrorism, let readers draw their own conclusions.”

Trouble Songs follows Stuart’s BBC TV documentary on Northern Ireland’s music, So Hard to Beat, and a long-running radio series on a similar subject for BBC Radio Ulster.

He’s also written an authorised biography of Thin Lizzy and TV and radio documentaries about U2, Elvis Costello and Glen Campbell, while co-founding Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre before deciding to get this story down before getting ‘knocked over by a bus’. You have to decide, ‘What do you want to have on your obit?’ I decided, ‘He went down deep and wrote this story about how music